CRITICS' CHOICE; New CDs: Cryptacize

By NATE CHINEN

Published: April 20, 2009

CRYPTACIZE
''Mythomania''
(Asthmatic Kitty)

Nedelle Torrisi, the lead singer of Cryptacize, has a guileless voice, an instrument of earnest pleasure and petition. ''If I could find my way back to you,'' she cries one minute into the band's second album, ''Mythomania,'' leaving the thought wistfully unfinished. She sounds rueful and sweet, though the song, ''Tail & Mane,'' has already made it clear she's pursuing her love on a stolen horse.

Mythomania is a clinical term for a compulsive pattern of deception: pathological lying, in other words. For Ms. Torrisi and her band mates, the guitarist Chris Cohen and the drummer Michael Carreira, it also represents the fanciful potential of a pop song, where one indelible image or canny melody can blur the lines between memory and nostalgia, truth and untruth. ''You're only seeing part of me,'' Ms. Torrisi declares on one track. ''This isn't me,'' she protests in another, tears running down her cheek. It often isn't clear what she herself believes.

The music suffers no such uncertainties. Mr. Cohen, a former member of the convulsive indie-rock band Deerhoof, balances skewed psychedelic harmonies against stylized but deceptively simple guitar lines. Mr. Carreira works with old music-hall rhythms, rarely indulging in a backbeat. And Ms. Torrisi plays what sound like Wurlitzers and toy pianos, evoking Ennio Morricone or, more puckishly, Serge Gainsbourg.

The lyrics, sometimes also sung by Mr. Cohen, abound in surrealistic metaphor: the bloom of a flower in darkness, the derisive laughter of the moon. Yet there are lines, and even entire songs, that beg to be taken at face value. ''With you, I'll take the long way home,'' Ms. Torrisi sings in one of them, near the album's close. But can she be trusted?

One answer arrives in the next song, ''New Spell.'' It's addressed to an untrustworthy lover, someone whose lies have become painfully apparent. ''I've got a new spell,'' Ms. Torrisi warns this person. ''Be careful what you say and do.'' NATE CHINEN